“Lady Brightlingsea considered it her duty to fish out of this out darkness, and drag for a moment into the light, any person or obligation entitled to fix her husband's attention; but they always faded back into night as soon as they had served their purpose.”

“They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all.”

“They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.”

“Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.”

“At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.”

“Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.”